1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to retrieving, analyzing and delivering information using user profiles that are explicitly edited by the user, and tools for facilitating the creation and editing of such profiles by users in an interactive, computer implemented process.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is becoming a leading source for news. However, the amount of news available through the Internet is overwhelming. Thus, Internet portals and other websites offer so-called personalization to varying degrees. A great deal of active research is being conducted concerning how to improve personalized access to news and other resources. See, Pretschner et al., “Ontology Based Personalized Search,” Proc. 11th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, pp. 391-398, Chicago, November 1999.
Personalization technologies often require creation of a user profile, which is used in the process of filtering information and presenting the information to the user. One common perception in this field is that profile creation should not require significant effort by the user at the risk of alienation and loss of the customer. However, so-called open profiles which include editable user models have been proposed, allowing a user to examine and edit a user profile. See, Ahn et al., “Open User Profiles for Adaptive News Systems: Help or Harm?”, International World Wide Web Conference Committee, WWW2007, May 8-12, 2007. In Ahn et al., an editable profile is described based on the display of keywords used in the filtering process. The user is able to add and delete words from the list. Also, the process identifies “top” keywords in articles returned to the user, which enables the user to discover the terms used in the articles, and utilize the information in the process of editing the profile. Ahn et al. found however that providing a user the ability to add and remove keywords typically harms system and user performance in information retrieval systems. Ahn et al. suggests that user editable profiles might work in systems that have good control over the delivery of cumulative or duplicative articles, which they characterize as good “novelty control”, in the filtering of information to deliver to the users. They found evidence that duplicative articles led users to try to amend their profiles to eliminate the duplicates, with poor results. However, as Ahn et al. have demonstrated, practical and useful systems based on open user profiles have not been deployed.
It is desirable therefore to provide personalization technologies based on open profiles which can be modified by users, in a way that actually improves the results of the information filtering and presentation systems.